The Subtle Art of Brutality

ere because they could still conduct business in Saint Ansgar without the pain of residing in a city overrun with scum.

When they heard the ruined Saint Ansgar was looking to finance a public transportation system, ideas sprang up there as well. Three Mile High jumped right in and they got things worked out in such a way to connect the rails to each city, thereby creating a lifeline between to the two. Each city knew the other had less than selfless reasons but who cares? Politics might have been founded on the idea of noble prosperity but it runs off of selfish interests and the backs of others.

The rail opened the doors to Three Mile High for Saint Ansgar’s commerce, travel, vacation and business. It was no longer a three-hour drive through winding roads and tunnels excavated during The Great Depression to transverse between cities. It was a one-hour train ride. People can live in one town and work in the other if they want. Feasibility had a new face.

There is only one rail line going each way, to and from each, and with very good reason.

Three Mile High was clean then and still mostly clean now; Saint Ansgar has never been clean. Three Mile’s city government knew they would be installing a revolving door for their neighboring town’s trash to commute back and forth, committing crimes and scumming up the place as they went. But they did it smartly.

Three Mile High put the incoming rail station platform inside a newly constructed complex that just happened to have a police station inside it. The whole thing resembles the vast underground subway stations of New York City and wherever else. Vaulted ceilings, arches, everything tiled and decorated, newsstands and small food vendors. And cops right there, walking a beat and eyeballing everybody. They’d put plain-clothes officers on board the Rail who would ferret out potential jail candidates and radio ahead. Some days I heard it was like shooting fish in a barrel.

Drug mules and common thugs learned very quickly that when they got off the Rail the first thing they encountered were the hungriest, cockiest motherfuckers in law enforcement.

To this day Three Mile High has done a remarkably good job keeping themselves connected to us while not contracting Saint Ansgar’s prevalent and vicious diseases. Of course the Big Fry made it there; it made it everywhere. But, overall, it’s a better place to be.

The rail station I wait at is empty save for the homeless guy passed out in the corner. The platform smells like stale beer and urine, and the housekeeping crew hasn’t been here to tidy up since the Clinton administration.

Standing on the platform tasting the Siberian tinge to the coming morning, I go over the facts again: Abigail can’t recall anything about their attacker. Said it was a frenzy; pitch black. Fear scrambled her brains. She was trying to protect the little girl. Her husband got a few good punches in, put the guy through the drywall. Football tackle. Said the attacker took that one pretty hard but in the end he clubbed Tyler. Then went right for her. She said she took the blow cradling the baby; shielding the girl with her body.

Darla Boothe was at work. Came home and her place was already being tended to by the FD. Investigator Rudd filled her in on the sketchy details. The front door was kicked in. Various misogynistic phrases were spray painted on the walls. It seemed the intruder graffitied the place and then used rubbing alcohol to soak a pile of bed sheets. Only half the place had been eaten alive by the time the FD started fighting. So far, Clevenger said no prints. Rudd is checking ex-boyfriends, guys Darla thinks she might have given the wrong impression to.

Apparently Benjamin Boothe just got out of stir. He took a beef for rape. Date rape. Drunk and on drugs, he said she was cool with it and she said she wasn’t. The sentencing judge was compassionate with him.

Maybe Ben Boothe is tearing through his old hit list. Wife, daughter, Derne: man who took his place. I wonder who the rape complainant was. If it is Ben Boothe doing this, she’s got to have it coming. If she hasn’t bitten it already. Clevenger said he heard from Investigator Rudd that Boothe’s old cellmate was a firebug.

I need to talk to Ben Boothe. I’d like to talk to the rape victim.

Finally the train comes rolling along, its metal-on-metal screeching a mating call in the ice-crusted night. It stops and the doors open but no one steps off. No one wants to come here. I step on in the first car and the doors shut me inside.

A homeless woman sits propped up in a corner snoring so loud I have to get three cars away from her before the sound ceases. Two punks are huddled together a few cars back but neither takes notice of me as I pass by. The population is sparse and bleak. I ease myself into a seat and shift the weight of my revolver.

The snow has been falling heavier in the last few hours. I settle in for the ride. The cocooning white-out dances about, a ravenously hungry thing opening its mouth for us at the final train whistle.

28

With a ghostly hum of metal on metal, the Rail meets Three Mile High and stops.

I’ve spent the ride drawing lines along the case, which is quickly becoming something much bigger than Derne hiring me to find one little lost lamb.

The brakes squeal as we slow. I start to get up and notice a runner of color streak down my vision. I sit back down. Easy. Another runner drips across the world. My heart gallops. I hate it when this happens and I’m in public. You never know the intentions of those walking past you. One might get an idea. Hand on my iron and then the world floods with the numbing effects of the Big Fry.

Blooms of cancerous color explode before me. My damaged brain fires off in flourishes of hot pigments before they transubstantiate into gentler, colder hues. Drizzles of that sickly vividness paint my internal everything and then, one by one, slowly erase as if all my mind needed to do was misfire for a moment before it simply reset.

I think one woman was startled by me. As I come back around she’s staring at me and nearly trips as she exits the train. I clear my throat, check to make sure I haven’t pissed myself, get up, get off the train.

The usual: throngs of morning commuters bustling this way and that. I break the underground’s threshold and the crisp mountain air tastes positively delicious.

Three Mile High in all its glory. A clean landscape of an ice blue metropolis. Tones of cobalt, azure, glacial sapphires and diamonds fill my world. This town is the ski resort polar opposite of Saint Ansgar. About the only thing they have in common is Three Mile High got the snow also. Blankets on the city.

My phone starts rattling. Clevenger.

“Hey, buddy.”

Clevenger snorts. Then, “Just thought you’d want to know that Pierce White’s wife said he went missing.”

“When?”

“This morning.”